This confused him, however. "But if it's not hers, then…I can't just.»
"It's just I've got to go out for a while," I said. "Tell you what — if it's not hers, then just bring it back, leave it on the step, okay?"
I could see him thinking this was a bit of a pain in the neck — especially over a single tin of canned meat — but then realising that my solution meant less disruption and paperwork than the likely alternatives.
"Done," he said, and walked off down the path.
I trotted to my study, grabbed the house keys from my shelf, and then back to the front door. I slipped out onto the step and locked up, listening hard.
When I heard the sliding slam of a van door, I walked cautiously down the path — making it to the pavement in time to see the delivery vehicle pull away.
There followed half an hour of slightly ludicrous cloak and daggery, as I tried to keep up with the supermarket van without being seen. The streets in our neighbourhood are full of houses exactly like ours — slightly bigger-than-usual Victorian terraces. Many of the streets curve, however, and two intersections out of three are blocked with wide metal gates, to stop people using the area as a rat route between the bigger thoroughfares which border it. The delivery driver had to take very circuitous routes to go relatively short distances, and bends in the street meant that, were I not careful, it would have been easy for him to spot me in his side mirrors. Assuming he'd been looking, of course, which he wouldn't be — but it's hard to remind yourself of that when you're engaged in quite so silly an enterprise.
Keeping as far back as I could without risking losing him, I followed the vehicle as it traced a route which eventually led to it pulling up outside a house six or seven streets away from our house. Once he'd parked I faded back forty yards and leaned on a tree. He'd said the stop that I was interested in was not this one, but the next, and I judged him to be a person who'd use language in a precise (albeit not especially educated) way. He wouldn't have said "next but one" if he meant this house, so all I had to do was wait it out.
Whoever lived here was either catering for a party or simply ate a lot, all the time. It took the guy nearly fifteen minutes to drag all the red, green, and purple bags up the path and into the house — where a plump grey-haired man imperiously directed their distribution indoors. This gave me plenty of time to realise I was being absolutely ridiculous. At one point I even decided just to walk away, but my feet evidently didn't get the message, and when he eventually climbed back into the van and started the engine, I felt my heart given a strange double thump.
She would be next.
I don't know if the delivery driver had suddenly realised he was behind schedule, but the next section of following was a lot tougher. The van lurched from the curb as though he'd stamped on the pedal, and he steered through the streets at a far brisker pace than before. I was soon having to trot to keep up — all the while trying not to get too close on his tail. I don't exercise very often (something I take recurrent low-level flak from Helen over), and before long I was panting hard.
Thankfully, it was only a few more minutes before I saw the van indicating, then abruptly swerving over to the curb again. The funny thing was, we were now only about three streets from my house. We were on, in fact, the very road I walked every morning when I strolled out to the deli to buy a latté to carry back to my desk — a key pillar in my attempts to develop something approaching a "lifestyle."
I waited (again, taking cover behind a handy tree) while the delivery man got out, slid open the van's side door, and got inside. He emerged a few minutes later carrying only three bags. They were all red, which I found interesting. No frozen food. No household materials. Just stuff to go straight in the fridge — and probably meats and charcuterie and cheeses that were a pleasure to eat, rather then feeling they were part of some obscure workout.
There were only two front paths that made sense from where he'd parked, and I banked on the one on the right — sidling up the street to the next tree, in the hope of getting a better view. I was right. The man plodded up the right-most path toward a house which, in almost every particular, was functionally identical to the one in which Helen and Oscar and I lived. A three-story Victorian house, the lowest level a half-basement slightly below the height of the street, behind a very small and sloping "garden." I was confident this lower floor would hold a kitchen and family room and small utility area, just as ours did — though of course I couldn't see this from my position across the street.
The man had the bags looped around his wrist, enabling him to reach up and ring the doorbell with that hand. After perhaps a minute, I saw the door open. I caught a glimpse of long, brown hair.
And then a sodding lorry trundled into view, completely obscuring the other side of the street.
I'd been so focused on watching the house that I hadn't seen or even heard the vehicle's approach. It ground to a halt right in front of me, and the driver turned the engine off. A gangly youth hopped down out of it immediately, busily consulting a furniture note and scanning the numbers of the houses on the side of the street where I was standing.
I moved quickly to the left, but I was too late. The supermarket delivery man was coming back down the path, and the door to the house was shut again.
"Bollocks," I said, without meaning to.
I said it loudly enough that the delivery man looked up, however. It took a second for him to recognise me, but then he grinned.
"You was right," he called across the street. "Was hers after all. Cheers, mate. Job done."
And with that he climbed back into his van. I turned and walked quickly in the other direction, thinking I might as well go to the deli and get a coffee.
Maybe they could put something in it that stopped middle-aged men being utter, utter morons.
That evening Helen had an assignation with two of her old university friends. This is one of the few occasions these days when she tends to let her hair down and drink too much wine, so I made her a snack before she went out. After she'd gone and Oscar had been encouraged up to bed (or at least to hang out in his bedroom, rather than lurking downstairs watching reality television), I found myself becalmed in the kitchen.
I'd got almost none of my work done that afternoon. Once the feelings of toe-curling embarrassment had faded — okay, so the supermarket guy had seen me on the street, but he'd had no way of knowing what I was doing there, no reason to suspect I was up to anything untoward — I'd found myself all the more intrigued.
There was the matter of the corned beef, for a start. I knew damn well that there had been no error over it. I'd bought it myself, a month or two back, from the mini-market. I like some corned beef in a sandwich every now and then, with lettuce and good slather of horseradish. I'd fully assumed that the tin would make its way back to me. And yet, when presented with it, the woman had decided to claim it as her own.
I found this curious, and even a little exciting. I knew that had Helen been in a similar situation she would have done nothing of the sort, even if the item in question had been totally healthy and certified GM-negative. This other woman had been given the change to scoop up a freebie, however, and had said "Yes please."
Then there was her hair.
It was infuriating that I hadn't been given the chance to get a proper look at her, but in a way, just the hair had been enough. Helen is blonde, you see. Really it's a kind of very light brown, of course, but the diligent attentions of stylists keep it mid-blonde. A trivial difference, but a difference all the same.
Trivial, too, was the geographical distance. The woman lived just three streets away. She paid the same rates, received cheery missives from the same local council, and would use — probably on a more frequent basis than we do — the services of the same takeaway food emporiums. If she went into the centre of London, she'd use the same tube station. If it rained on our back garden, it would be raining on hers. The air I breathed stood at least some chance of making it, a little later, into her lungs.